Report: Iran Arrests 3 for Encouraging Protest for Money From US, Saudi Arabia

Iran arrested three people it says were encouraging the protests now in their seventh week across the country, accusing them of being sponsored by the United States and Saudi Arabia. The report in the semiofficial Tasnim news agency, quoting an unnamed but “informed” source, said the three arrested people cooperated with the Saudi-sponsored Iran International TV station, and with TavaanaTech, a Persian-language platform that provides Iranians with guidance and advice on circumventing internet censorship and keeping safe online.

TavaanaTech is a project of Tavaana: E-Learning Institute for Iranian Civil Society, which is partly funded by the US State Department, the Foreign Ministry of the Netherlands, and Google.

The report said that the detained suspects received large sums of money from the organizations to carry out their “missions” in Iran. They are accused of posing as citizen journalists and providing news and information to the organizations in exchange for money. The report did not say what kind of information the arrestees were providing.

The protests were sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, a Kurdish Iranian woman who died in the custody of Iran’s morality police while being held for wearing her hijab incorrectly.

Meanwhile, 40 Iranian human rights lawyers publicly criticized Iran’s leaders, saying their crackdowns on protests will no longer work and that protesters calling for a new political order will win. “The government is still drowning in illusions and believes it can repress, arrest and kill to silence,” the lawyers located both inside and outside of Iran said in a statement sent to Reuters. “But the flood of people will ultimately remove a government because the divine will side with the people. The voice of the people is the voice of God,” the letter also said. The lawyers that remain in Iran could be arrested due to the letter.